The path from cliticised to prefixed person marking in proto-Australian

Abstract

Introduction Givón (1971) famously said (paraphrasing Hodge 1970): ‘If today’s bound morphemes are yesterday’s lexical words, then today’s morphology is yesterday’s syntax’. While the years since have given us no reason to doubt the truth of this observation, the fact remains that explaining how one is derived from the other is not always straightforward. Jane Simpson once observed, possibly in a personal communication (neither of us can remember!), that no language has a system of independent pronouns that combines subjects and objects into portmanteaux. But portmanteaux – morphemes combining two or more functions within a form that cannot be easily divided into the individual functions – are common in pronominal indexing systems, particularly in combinations of 1st and 2nd person (Speech Act Participant: SAP) arguments (Heath 1991, 1998). One of the outstanding questions in linguistics is how they arise. I argue here that, even though a conclusive answer remains to be provided, we can identify some paths and some motivations for their development. In particular, I hope to provoke some thinks that one might think (to paraphrase Dr Seuss 1975), in order to work through this conundrum, one which Dixon (2002, 437) describes as ‘one of the most difficult topics in Australian linguistics’.